Gámez Fuentes and Núñez Puente situate the communicative strategies of feminist resistance in Spain on the international debate

María José Gámez Fuentes participated in the Social Movements and Media Technologies seminar at Goldsmiths, University of London, on the 27 of March 2017. The paper she prepared in collaboration with Sonia Ñúñez Puente, from URJC, entitled «Much Ado, about Nothing? Feminist Resistance against Neo-Liberal Post-Machismo Narratives in Spain”, is part of the MINECO project that both researchers coordinate on the contemporary media practices of re-signification of women as victims.

In such paper, they presented the current challenges in the media representation of gender violence in Spain which, since the approval of the Organic Law on Comprehensive Protection Measures against Gender Violence (2004), has focused on reproducing the stereotype of the battered woman. The pernicious effects of this cliché, which nullifies the possibilities of recognising women as politically active and resilient subjects, they maintain, have fostered the proliferation in social media of post-sexist discourses that question the veracity of cases of violence against women and that blame the victims for taking advantage of the legal opportunity of the complaint. The talk ended with the presentation of some of the communicative strategies of Spanish feminist activism focused upon subverting these recognition frameworks of what since 7N (2015) is known as “violencias machistas” through the recovery of the symbolic space of online social media in order to challenge and transform the prevailing discourse on gender violence in the current context of post-truth.

Along the lines of this presentation is the recent article that Núñez and Gámez have published in vol. 17 of Feminist Media Studies, entitled “Spanish feminism, popular misogyny and the place of the victim” where they reflect precisely on the effects of the popular appropriation of this ambivalent discourse between re-victimization and opportunism by the administration and by neo-machismo organizations of the HazteOir and Projusticia Association kind, as highlighted